From what I’ve heard, only about 18 percent of web users ever click on a display ad. But studies have clearly shown that display ads affect people’s behavior. Sometimes people see the ad and enter the URL directly. Sometimes it leads them to search on a brand-related term. For example, a web user might see …
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I’m going to be doing a presentation on analytics in a few weeks at the SIPA Mid-Year Marketing Conference. The presentation has ten exercises to encourage practical steps publishers can take from the data on website usage. Here’s the first one, which has to do with fine-tuning your web pages for your visitors. Step 1 …
I was just signing up for a conference, and the registration form had a couple “usability” problems. First, it asked me for my zip+4. I don’t know what it is. I had to get a piece of mail addressed to me to find out. Why would you do that? How many people actually know their …
I’m in the market for a dishwasher, so I thought I’d go to consumer reports and see which ones are the best. I tried to sign up for their service and I got an error on the registration page. When you sign up you have to “create an account” with a username and password, and …
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Google has a new tool called the “Wonder Wheel.” Yeah, it’s a silly name, but it’s a good tool, and when used in combination with Google Trends and a standard keyword tool it could be a very effective way to increase traffic to your web pages. First, give it a try. 1. Google a term …
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Rupert Murdoch is realizing that the advertising model — give away the content and sell ads on the page — simply won’t sustain most major media operations. See Murdoch vows to charge for all online content I believe two things about media companies. There are too many of them, and some will have to fail …
I am. I read a lot of them, but not nearly as many as I’d like to. There’s lots of good information out there, and I’m sure it would help me in my daily work, but I’m too busy with my daily work to read the things. I’m sure this is true for lots of …
The last few days I’ve done some reading on bounce rates and spent some time in Google Analytics getting a feel for what’s what, and it seems that the best rule for bounce rates is that you’re doing well if your bounce rate is lower than it was last month. Some articles will give you …
I had an interesting chat with a friend of mine from SIPA. Harry had read a statistic that people are spending less and less time on newspaper sites. (I don’t know if this is what he’d read, but along those lines see Average Time Spent on Top 30 Newspaper Web Sites Declines — More Than …
According to Forbes, David Heinemeier Hansson has caused a ruckus by promoting the idea that online customers should actually pay for products. Imagine that three shoe companies have come to you for some venture capital. They each have a different business model, as follows. Give away the shoes to get market share, then charge for …